China Quits Video Games: the Three Hour Limit.

it's interesting to me how uncomfortable
people are talking about the next 50 years the next 100 years the next 500 years thinking about culture and politics and progress who we want to be as individuals skilling it up what kind of society we want to have in a larger scale in terms of that kind of time scale now if you were to divide the nations of the world into about six categories i'm gonna say there are those countries that embrace everyone from the earliest possible age playing more and more video games unlimited quantity unlimited quality of video game playing from age four age six i mean you can play video games age four already right and then there are those countries that get committed to not just legally but also you know culturally they get committed to severely restricting the number of hours kids play video games and presumably discouraging also adults from playing videos okay how's that going to turn out over the next 50 years over the next 100 years over the next 500 years if we're now at a fork in the road where china is going in one direction and the united states is going in another we talk about england we talk about germany it's not just china versus america right we could talk about japan talk about taiwan talk about countries that are really close to china and culturally linked to china in many ways but different in this respect okay how do you think that's going to turn out in the next 50 years next 200 years next year's let me see in case you find it difficult to visualize what the problem is with having all children like from four years old to 12 years old all high school students all university students playing video games for unlimited numbers of hours per week let's just propose an experiment right here and now in the canadian military where we take each and every battalion each and every job as they say in the military and we divide them into two parts and we have one half of the men so like you know guys who do air traffic control like very specific jobs in the military that but also say the you know the snipers just use these as two examples okay okay so this half we're going to send to go on this army base where everyone's allowed to play video games all day all night every day as much as their hearts desire they can play them on their mobile phones they can play them in their bunk beds they can play them sitting up right at a computer at a gaming pc we have in the lunchroom can have video game consoles unlimited video games then we have a separate base where we send the other half of the guys doing the same jobs in the military so half of the snipers half the air traffic control guys as they're going through basic training as they're going through their whole training and education regimen and we allow absolutely zero video games on base we very strictly force what what do you think the outcomes would be who do you think's gonna do better how about uh medical school what which medical school do you think it's going to produce better surgeons and doctors right hey let's let's do it cradle to grave you have one group of medical doctors who have been playing video games since age four in unlimited amounts all the way through to the conclusion of medical school while they're in medical school they're playing video games you have another medical school where these people have never been allowed to play videos not even at four years old nor once they've gone into the university level study music what are you what do you think okay now tell me something do you think that's only a problem for guys in the u.s sniper corps like or the canadian sniper corps or whatever guys who are snipers for the germans do you think staying up at night playing videos it's only a problem for guys who are snipers or guys who are aircraft pilots or guys who are in the ground crew for the the air force or you know you think that's only a problem for search or do you think do you think do you think that touches something that's you know significant in every part of human life well a little bit of a digression here there's another youtube channel and you can figure out which one this is because i don't i don't watch many youtube channels so the youtube channel um who commented recently she said and she was she was kind of mad at herself for saying this she said that she wanted to leave the town she's living in now and move somewhere else where she she'd be around young people like i guess i don't know where she's living she's living in some town or some neighborhood where it seems like everyone's retired i guess that she didn't realize my and she kind of got mad herself and she said when i say young people i mean people in their 30s [Laughter] so she's herself in her 30s and she wants to be around other people in her 30s i don't know where she's living but i guess it's a retirement uh community anyway i left the comment i said look i'm just gonna keep it real with you for me one of the best things about my life in laos and thailand i could say this about cambodia but really it was laos of thailand um one of the best things about my life in southeast asia was spending a lot of quality time with people over 60 years old you know both you know europeans australians foreigners in the sense but also local local people like old old rice farmers who had lived through the war and stuff you know i i really felt i benefited a lot from that and it's not easy you know socializing with someone when you've really got a big gap in age and experience it's not it's work you know when i don't drink alcohol and pretty much all those people drink alcohol every day you know there are there are problems there things actually i'm sorry i could also say this book could make when i lived in kunming china i talked to a lot of people definitely over 50 over 50. i gained a lot from that kind of uh that kind of conversation that kind of interaction you know um how much time do children spend talking to their grandparents and their great-grandparents in the year 2021 versus 1971. okay grandparents great-grandparents we also say kind of older aunts uncles great aunts great uncles i guarantee you it's less and i guarantee you it's less because of video games now video games movies tv it's not just videos it's not easy for a child to really have a quality conversation with their grandparent it's not easy for the grandparent to really communicate with and say something meaningful to a child it's not easy you know what's easy for the grandparent to go smoke cigarettes in the other room while the kid is playing video games all right it's happening on a massive scale so it's not just your relationship to formal education it's not just your relationship to book learning that is eroded in this way and you know i would say this also about the guys in the army you know like there are the four there's the formal training there's what you're supposed to learn that's written down on a chalkboard board written down in a textbook there's other kinds of learning that goes on on an army base when you're in military service there's just sitting around with older guys might not be easy to get along with some of them are literally shell-shocked they're guys who have some level of trauma experience some of them are just ornery some are curmudgeons you know they're not easy to talk to and they may be especially uh ornery and uh curmudgeonly when talking to a young upstart some guys just just going through basic training a new recruit or something someone who's much younger oh these young guys they don't understand what i went through in the war 20 years ago or whatever it is for them you know whatever but you know what's really valuable what's really important is that that older person takes the time to sit down and talk things through with the younger person and it can happen in a totally spontaneous unplanned way on a military base where you're getting that quality interaction with an older person video games they don't directly obstruct that right they compete for your time in a way that you know eliminates those things from your life and you know i totally get that a formal activity you might do with your grandparents like playing baseball playing catch with your grandfather it's completely meaningless throwing the ball back and forth may be just as meaningless as a video game now playing poker like playing a card game with your grandparents if you're looking at the game itself it may be just as meaningless but the in-depth conversation you may have with your grandparents or again with the older guys on the army base when you're just spending time with them peeling potatoes shining shoes chopping firewood you know whatever they're all kinds of money tests whether it's with your grandparents or with older guys in the military or with other people at your medical school there's a lot of learning that goes on the rest of the time that playing video games you know destroys so you say when you look at the map of the world it's a great comment shout out to barry scott barry scott says i would love to see isil do a review of metal gear solid or some other series i have done some video game review videos and i've i've planned to do others so search my channel for uh c64 i think it's one of the best videos on my channel but i have a review of the commodore 64 the comic 64 mini um i'm very happy to do videos talking about video game content but yeah if i were to make videos talking about this stuff probably a lot of it would be very negative great to see you guys in the audience obviously this is an unscheduled spontaneous live stream if you guys have a second uh to hit thumbs up uh hit thumbs up so uh eamonn flame thanks to comment i will i will answer i will speak to your comment in in just a moment okay so you look at the map of the world it's okay here we are in the year 2021 and there are going to be some countries and some cultures that encourage infinite unlimited consumption of video games i'm using consumption you'll see why for simplicity's sake right obviously the problem isn't buying video games the problem is the number of hours you're spending on video games i can really say to you i know there are people who collect what are called big box video games if you don't know what that is don't don't google it but you know i understand there are people who literally collect video games in the same way that you would collect posters where they want to have it for the big box they want to have this box on their wall and they are like the amount of money and time you spend like if you just buy it you have to hang it on your wall like a poster it really doesn't do you any harm right the problem is the problem is actually playing the video games how many hours it takes out of your life with all these knock-on consequences but okay so you have one part of the world that's encouraging and allowing unlimited consumption of video games from childhood forward and guys it doesn't stop being a problem in childhood we could ask ourselves what is the optimum number of hours per week for a child to be playing video games what is the optimum number of hours per week for a teenager but you know what let me ask you what's the optimum number of hours per week for that child's parents the only place i know that's really been honest about this problem with south korea obviously it's possible there have been some documentary films made in japan and i didn't hear about them but i know in south korea they were it was probably with government encouragement but they were doing all these hard-hitting documentaries talking about parents who neglect their kids because they're sitting in the back of the house or even sitting in an internet cafe at a computer terminal playing these video games for hours and hours they're not being parents because they're addicted to video games in the past that happened with being addicted to playing cards being addicted to gambling or whatever so sure in some ways it's unsurprising but in some ways i think it's a really significant phenomenon that nobody has measured the extent of because nobody wants to know i mean there's a little bit of discourse about that in america people who were addicted i remember decades ago uh people to everquest and then they neglected their own children so you know what is the optimum number of hours those questions still have to be asked you're talking about people who are 20 30 40 50 60 for your for your whole life right and the question of what is optimal is totally different from the question of well what is the maximum amount of time i can waste without my grades at school suffering different frame of reference okay and if we're looking ahead for the next 50 years who's going to do better therefore china or the united states of america in every possible area of human endeavor obviously this is a massive advantage for china short-term and long term if they could actually limit every child in the country to only playing video games for three hours a week it's unbelievable unbelievable competitive advantage for china on the scale of one billion people well over one billion now uh but anyway one billion people if you could get everyone in china playing video games for only three hours per week then you have another culture where it's 30 hours per week there's no there's no comparison okay um what's going to happen the next 50 years when you contrast a country like japan to an area like california oregon washington state british columbia this is the west coast the united states and canada what happens when you compare the countries that are implicitly or explicitly encouraging the unlimited consumption of illegal drugs to the countries that are really seriously enforcing drug laws that are really seriously encouraging and enforcing sobriety right how's that going to play out 10 years 50 years 100 years 500 years if you divide the map of the world into two kinds of countries now i admit at this point you've got to have some subcategories china japan taiwan singapore these places are anti-drug and pro-sobriety they're not muslim saudi arabia is also pretty serious about drug policy you know there are a lot of muslim fundamentalist countries that are pretty serious about keeping heroin and cocaine and even marijuana out of people's hands the attitude towards marijuana hashish varies it's not the same in all muslim countries there are some where they have a totally permissive attitude towards because it's a traditional local drug you know um what do you think is going to happen over the next 50 years over the next uh 500 years okay i'm just going to just going to pause i got some interesting confusing questions so bonjour trieste says quote i can almost predict someone will respond to this video saying that isil is sympathizing with totalitarianism to defend video games i.e that in their defense of video games they'll accuse me of sympathizing with totalitarianism you know um there's a really moving passage in a salast so i'm going to type out the name because a lot of people do not know this author so salus equals an ancient roman author so his name has not become famous the way plato and aristotle have but he's just as important or more important frankly um you know there's a debate that he records in ancient rome in a particular political crisis so different people are standing up in the senate and debating what should happen next and one of the debaters i think it's julius caesar a very young julius caesar before he's become a dictator himself he stands up and he says you know what really makes rome special is our ability to learn from our enemies if foreign cultures and foreign nations and foreign empires if they're doing something right we have the humility to put aside our own traditions or our own our own religious preconceptions and imitate them in virtue imitate whatever they're they're doing right now you know it's a propaganda claim i mean what he actually says it may not be factually true at all it's he's trying to win the debate about particular typical particular issues and so on um you know if the chinese are right about something would you be willing to disregard that just because they're chinese i wouldn't you know if the swiss are right about something if the danish are right about something it doesn't really matter to me that they happen to be swiss or danish now i say this i'm sitting in canada and i'm walking distance from the us border we can see america from here when we look south you know i'm very we're really right on the american border um there are a lot of people in america who are aware on some level that the swiss are doing something right that america's doing wrong and they get very nervous talking about that they really have difficulty admitting to themselves this the swiss and the danish are really being tremendously successful in areas where america is very weak or very incompetent you know so it's very hard i mean i remember before donald trump was elected uh him talking about how scotland had a better health care system than the united states of america now he didn't do anything to imitate scotland's health care system in the united states america i would not say by the way scotland has the world's greatest health care system i'm not saying it's optimal i'm not saying it's an ideal but it's significant that you can find a quotation from donald trump saying how great scotland's healthcare system is compared to the united states of america i don't think he did a whole hell of a lot of research to cover that you have to be willing to learn from your enemies not just your friends you have to be able to you know you have to be able to learn from alien and foreign cultures you have to be able to learn from precedence from ancient history as well as as modern history but what works and what what doesn't so yeah um all right thanks guys for all your comments uh if you have a moment hit thumbs up please do hit thumbs up because it'll just result in more people joining the conversation while this is going on like if there are 40 people here and we got 40 thumbs up more people find it if you guys know anyone who wants to join you can send a link to a friend of yours on facebook or twitter or something don't i never encourage people to like spam the link to this live stream like just dump it on the internet where people are not interested but if you actually know a facebook group people are interested or you have specific friends on facebook or twitter or whatever um obviously i'm happy for you to share the link too and they can they can join the conversation okay so look i want to talk about three three categories here uh and i don't know if any one country well okay fits into the advantageous side of all three distinctions maybe maybe china does i'll have to have to think that through okay so you have some countries that are allowing unlimited consumption of video games and some that want to eliminate with certainly the clear implication being that video games should even be eliminated that they should be minimized and probably you'll start getting a lot of social messaging basically saying look if you're a real man you shouldn't be playing video games at all i think that it's both the implicit and and you know in future it'll be the explicit point of china's anti-video game crusade um there are going to be countries that are permitting pardon me unlimited use of illegal drugs we took a very short walk this morning about 9 00 am wasn't super early maybe 8 30. 8 30 a.m let's say and just walking down the street walking two or three blocks in the street we passed two different guys who had the glass crack pipe out in front of them with the lighter and the tinfoil um which drug exactly they were using what i was that would either be crack crack cocaine fentanyl meth you know be one of those here opiates are quite quite popular so it could be fentanyl obviously but these are hard drug acts they make no effort to conceal their drug use now we passed many others who are drug drug addicts who were like slumped over but we passed two who are in the moment of lighting up with the glass pipe visible there's absolutely no pressure on anyone here to to conceal their hard drug use the use of even injecting heroin that is done openly in public um by drug addicts here as well as slumping over and sleeping in the parks and sidewalks there's no right they are under no threat there's no fear they'll ever be they'll ever be arrested with place now obviously it would not be very much effort for them to just conceal their drug it to be an addict but actually keep it out of the public and little children walk past the drugs and so on so you know um oh gosh i got someone saying that shirt is fire so if you don't know the if you if you want one yourself i'm gonna do a review of the t-shirt maker um the shop that's providing this service but i haven't done a youtube video about it yet i have both good and bad to say about it but melissa also got one of the hoodies out of them and we got some cups so yeah if if you want yeah you can yeah at this moment you have to draw your own conclusion but when i do a youtube video reviewing it i will say both the good and the bad from a customer's perspective and from a youtube creator's uh perspective anyway uh we got a comment from ariel saying scotland actually has worse health results than the rest of the uk but errol are you comparing it to florida comparing it to california comparing it to texas yeah i i'm aware i've lived in scotland i'm aware scotland is not paradise i'm aware england is not paradise but as it was just an interesting thing that donald trump himself had said scotland has a better system than than america does so that's that's all it's one that was admitted uh there's this movie this movie i keep alluding to by um by michael moore so [Laughter] michael moore made a movie where he traveled around europe and talked openly about this the ways in which different countries in europe including um uh italy and denmark and what have you really are okay really okay so michael moore 2007 sicko i mean it's not a brilliant film it's an okay film but that's that's exactly that discourse of imitating uh what other countries have gotten right okay um [Music] so if you divide up the map of the world there are the countries that are allowing video game addiction to run rampant there are those that are trying to eliminate and discourage it there are those that are allowing drug addiction to run rampant and even encouraging and enabling it and then there are those countries that are trying to limit it and discourage it all right and the third most shocking most defensive category i want to mention is there are those countries that are encouraging immigration that are encouraging more refugees to settle there that are encouraging multiculturalism and there are those that are trying to limit it or minimize it right kind of multiculturalism and monoculturalism you could say right so that's that's a three-way split now communist china on all three it's in the stronger category right they are discouraging video games they're discouraging drug addiction with brutal efficacy right and they're discouraging immigration they don't want to be they they do want to be a multicultural society but they want them the multiple cultures they have to be all the cultures that are already indigenous to china that have already been there for at least 500 years or what have you they don't want to become a multicultural society in another sense they don't want to have a brazil town in beijing they don't want to have a venezuela town in nanjing they want to have you know they could think about how many millions of people from south africa uh pardon me i meant to say south america think about how many millions people from south america would very gladly migrate to china if they could but we could say about south africa too how many months people would love to migrate from africa to china they don't want to have a multicultural society in that in that sense and it's a huge struggle if you guys don't know i study chinese as a language it's a huge struggle just to have everyone in china speaking the same language because historically they did speak many different languages there's a very low level of mutual comprehension between the dialects and languages that that comprised china okay you have a country like japan right currently still in the pro video game column they're still encouraging unlimited amounts of video game playing and video addiction but they're in the anti-drug column and anti-immigration column anti-immigration anti-multiculturalism okay you have a place like currently the united states and canada certainly the west coast of the united states and canada especially pro-drug pro-video game addiction pro-mass immigration multiculturalism mass refugee relocation right how do you think that's going to work out in 50 years how do you think that's going to work out in 500 years now the one sense in which i think this discourse is insincere is that i think anyone who has a background in social science research would look at these indicators and say it is just a matter of time before the united states of america admits that it's wrong and starts imitating china on these issues there's there's just no other way about it there is no way we can continue having an enormous tent city in venice beach california or in seattle i mean all these cities uh oh philadelphia that's horrifying i don't know if they have tents there though i didn't see any tents but it's just drug addicts just lying on the street openly without tense um portland oregon you know the mass drug addiction epidemic being encouraged by government authorities rather than being prevented rather people be put in prison and actually being you know suppressed or what have you you know okay well this can go on for another 10 years another 20 years but at some point like the unbelievable disadvantage this poses on every level like personally like your own family your own circle of friends as an atomized individual and then scaling it up and talking about you know thousands of people and your your city your community and scaling up time with your your province your state your country you know your county or whatever like at every level the disadvantage this entails it's so stark it's so severe it's so extreme that at some point government policy democratically or undemocratically has to reverse course we have to become an anti-drug addict society we have to become an anti-video game addict society there aren't two possible viable answers to this and the longer this goes on if the world is divided between two hemispheres the people who are actually restricting and suppressing video game addiction people are allowing it to run rampant the advantage that the anti-video game side has will become so obvious to everyone frankly the chinese will tower over us as intellectual giants because they did not lose half of their lives between age 10 and age 30 playing video games all right and you can insert the most cynical commentary here imaginable like well if they aren't playing video games they're going to be doing some other [ __ ] that is just as much a waste of their time no no and go ahead do the you know do the research why don't you look at what people would do in med school if you take the class and split it say okay 50 of the med school students this year we're going to put you in video game players paradise we're going to provide you all everyone gets a nintendo switch in their dorm room and whatever you know we're going to include we're going to encourage even you know unlimited massive multiplayer online gaming you know and you have the the med school we take half of the students and put them on a different campus where there are absolutely no video games allowed and all the internet usage on the campus is very strictly monitored you know no online games where you actually treat any kind of video game console including a portable one as contraband what do you think what do you think they do with their time when they're not playing video games for all those hours you know the answer is nothing in particular but that's the time you would spend talking to your grandparents falling in love having a screaming fight with the woman you fell in love with discovering the woman you fell in love with cheated on you having your heart broken i mean you know sitting around with your friends uh playing monopoly while listening to rock music and chit chatting about this and that i'm not saying you're gonna take the time that would have gone to video games and and spend it studying twice as much for med school but certainly all of us know i mean you guys might not remember i was once challenged on this in an interview a live interview and um you know the guy was the guy was basically why is it that you're targeting video games this way uh and he said not coloring books not adult coloring books spending hours and hours filling an adult compost and i said he completely dropped it i said do you know anyone who ruined their university education with adult coloring books and then like the point was how many people do you know who ruined their university education through video game addiction and you know when i say ruined i i know there were people who dropped out their people actually failed but they're also people who just learned nothing and scraped by you know bare minimum okay so guys i'm going to check i'm going to check some of the comments now if you have a second hit the hit the thumbs up button there was one i wanted to respond to okay here we go aemon flame ammon amon aman flame perhaps it's pronounced quote it's all about balance period i've used video games for language learning there you go i've talked about that in other youtube videos before so he says quote i've used video games for language learning and they've been very helpful however someone playing a simple shooting game like call of duty seems like a big waste of time so um the part of your comment i disagree with eamon is balance um [Music] i used to live in france when you talk to the french about alcohol they say it's all about balance and what they mean is drinking alcohol lunch and dinner seven days a week they think that's balance okay there are alcoholics who think they have a balanced relationship to alcohol the problem with balance is it means whatever you want to mean people think they have a balanced smoking habit and they don't they're addicted to nicotine you know period um i don't believe in balance i believe in struggle i think that sobriety is a struggle okay for me to have zero caffeine is a struggle it would be more convenient for me to be a caffeine addict just my character and what i want to do with my life just being able to get out of bed and go to the gym right away after drinking coffee there's a convenience to being able to do it with with coffee and prop i've never tried the other stimulus probably adderall or something you know it's not about balance it's about doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do you know it's about choosing the rules of the game you're going to play and then never cheating not even once because ultimately the person you cheat is yourself and look guys you know these examples alcohol cigarettes coffee this is easy how hard is it to talk someone out of using testosterone booster how hard is it to talk them out of using steroids how hard is it to talk about using sarms because those are things that give a real real benefit they physically make you stronger they give you more endurance they make you more awake more alert more passionate more effective right um there is no balance with using testosterone boosting drugs steroids there's none you can't balance it you have to do the right thing because that's the right thing to do you have to lose rather than win because you refuse to use a performance-enhancing drug that would make you win instead of lose performance dancing drugs again steroids etc it's not the difference between third place and second place it's the difference between first place and last place you know it's different you win or lose in so many sports and so many competitions and it makes you more handsome and more charismatic and more attractive changes your whole life and we walk past just walking today we walked past several guys who were on steroids i i'm there's no doubt in my day i am certain i don't know if you noticed them like we didn't talk about it yes melissa noticed too just not even going to the gym just walking around we pass men who are very obviously on steroids back when we went to a certain gym we saw a lot of women who were on steroids at that at that gym it was a really hardcore uh lifting gym um so no it's not about balance you can never let people decide for themselves what balance means um because balance for most people most of the time means a life of total short-term selfish self-indulgence i'm just gonna read that total short-term selfish self-indulgence so i saw another youtube channel who said quite self-righteously that he is morally opposed to china's video game ban limiting video games to three uh three hours per week because he believes as a parent this guy's never been a parent he doesn't have kids never think he believes as a parent all you need to do is divide your child's time between homework chores and their entertainment and that just like an adult who has a job when you've done your job and you've done your chores then you're you the rest of your time can be and should be completely devoted just to your entertainment just to your self intelligence and from his perspective it doesn't make any difference whether you're playing video games or i don't know going to a rifle range and shooting targets or something so this is a model of what it means to be a human being this is a model of a meaningless life where you are profoundly and utterly committed just to your own self-indulgence right that's not what it takes to be a parent that's not what it takes to be a child that's not what it takes to be an adult divide the world's surface into two types of countries countries and cultures where people really take seriously that they have a higher purpose in this world and countries where they think it doesn't matter if you play video games for 30 hours a week doesn't matter if you play video games in all your free time the minute you finish your homework the minute you finished doing the dishes in the kitchen because there is nothing else to be aspired to in this life other than your own entertainment other than just playing video games for hours and hours and hours or some other activity that will be just as brainless just as narrowly focused on your own delight shall we say your own delight in that moment now when i say higher purpose i mean relative to video games i do not mean this in a religious sense but i'm going to put religion on the table here put it as a pawn on the chessboard so to speak for your for your consideration you know each and every one of us is the product of a process of evolution look at the nintendo switch holding up this glowing rectangle and pressing a button with just the right timing is this what your ancestors suffered and died for over so many millions of years is this what we evolved on this planet to do now i'll be real with you okay i'm vegan i'm vegan for ethical reasons i think there's actually a pretty strong argument when people say to me that they live to hunt not to buy animals from a factory you know but when people say that for them the meaning of life is carrying on this tradition from their ancestor and that they feel they evolved to live this way and you know there are people who refuse to use guns they're people who do just bow hunting and knife hunting you know they're people who really do it with stone age tools because it's more challenging hunting with a gun is incredibly easy it's one of the reasons there's more than one more challenge out of going out and trapping and killing things and they say that look this is what they evolved to do these are their instincts this is their cultural tradition and that's for them that's a big part of what it means to be a human being i actually think that's a that's a compelling argument and i say that's not good enough for me okay i say you know like okay if that's good enough for you that tells me something about who you are you know what you're doing with the potential you've inherited from that process of evolution now you may not know this but in terms of evolutionary psychology there are people who validate various kinds of sexual behavior who rationalize or justify different kind of sexually we're saying hey this is what i was evolved to do there's a whole dark demi-mod of the use and abuse of the concept of evolution to justify pursuing your your heart's desires or even very perverse desires you may have you may have come up with you may have ingeniously devised um but setting that aside you know when we're looking at the reality of people sitting for so many hours and pressing a button on the nintendo switch sitting at their desk clicking a mouse so they can play rainbow six or you know call of duty or what have you it's so low it's so low that we can ask in a meaningful sense weren't you born to do something better than this aren't you the inheritor of this dna produced through millions of years of evolution and the inheritor of this quality of life produced through the last few thousand years or last few centuries of struggle you know just just the fact that i can use a toilet and have running water and i can read by electrical light it's so easy to read a book now it's so easy to afford a book too compared to just 200 years ago you know in this totally different world we live in this way i was reading um the autobiography of benjamin franklin and you know he describes you as a younger man how difficult it was to get books how difficult it was to get candles and he uh he read he would get books from a publisher or from a warehouse from a shop handling book he was involved in publishing but then also you know bookstores and he had a relationship with some of the booksellers and they'd let him take a book like when he left work at eight o'clock at night and they'd say okay but bring it back by seven o'clock tomorrow because i got to put it back on the shelf to sell it you know he'd get to read books furiously he'd stay up at night reading a book he couldn't afford to buy you know books were scarce and books were expensive okay so you've inherited all this and you don't have a higher purpose than sitting there and and pressing that button and acting out these violent fantasies again and again sometimes they're sexual fantasies some video games sexuality is part of what makes it um appealing okay um you know i think that's i think that's a question that really answers itself and now i am a nihilistic atheist but nevertheless as low as our religious ideals are i think it's interesting that they're still high enough to debunk the status of video games in 21st century culture where you can ask the question you know is this what you were put on this earth for you know if if you believe in god is this what you think god created you for you know what i mean whatever religious tradition you if you're fro if you're a buddhist is this what you think you were reincarnated for you know um now i i repudiate all of those religious ideals and ideologies you know i i not in a trivial sense i really do reject them root and branch nevertheless playing video games it's so bad it's so awful that these questions start to become meaningful i think many of you will have the experience with your own friends and relatives with that with drug addiction where drug addicts start asking themselves tough questions like oh do you think you were evolved just to take the crushed up resin from this plant and inject it into your bloodstream or do you think god created you just so you could snort this powder up your nose you know it doesn't make sense it doesn't make sense from a scientific perspective it doesn't make sense from a religious perspective it doesn't make sense from any perspective but you got to have one perspective or another and that perspective cannot be one where you're committed to self-indulgence and where you feel that your only obligation in life is to do your job and do your chores clean your own dishes and then everything else in your life is self-indulgent and you can't look at children and say well their only obligation is to do their homework do their chores then everything else is so often though it's great to have 42 people in the audience i'd prefer if i had 42 thumbs up also it will help other people discover the video i'm catching up with your with your comments now so there's a question kind of directly and indirectly being raised by a few different people um [Music] i think some of you want to ask what is the difference between playing video games and watching movies uh none of you said something that simple or stupid you said some intelligent things from different um it is different i sit here and tell you that watching movies has some tremendously educational value but probably most of you in this audience can remember seeing a movie maybe with a grandparent as a child and then asking them to explain to you what happened or why certain things happen where you ask questions you watch and you're not sure what's going on now today most people can pause movies you know what i mean but normally you know watching a movie with parent with your older brother you know this kind of thing you know it is i mean it is it is educational in these ways i can definitely remember his child learning words and vocabulary from movies and so on now i'm not here to praise watching a movie with your grandparents as wonderful not but when we're making the comparison to video games video games are so low that still watching movies is better now again if you talk about if you say television television includes watching the news uh melissa and i just watched a video the other day about the history of the vietnam war you can you know obviously i think a lot of children learn about the vietnam war learn about world war ii for the first time by watching a movie about it now in a lot of that learning is bad i have a video criticizing pocahontas not that many people watch that video i totally totally encourage you to uh watch and share my video about about how awful pocahontas is this is a disney movie you know well uh probably a lot of showing the first time they ever thought about native americans or native american genocide or indigenous peoples or colonism probably walt disney's movie pokemon is the first time they they heard any of those words or thought about any of those concepts you know um right and melissa just said you will not get that from candy crush right you won't get it from super mario brothers and so on too so you know the i i think these are um so i'll just say that is uh that is the disney video so you know uh as with many of my um as with many of my my kind of critiques of 21st century society i do admit a difference between degrees of bad and worse and i do with video games also really i feel now more than ever that video games after the year 1997 are so much worse than video games before the year 1997. i think there's a big difference between online gaming and offline gaming i think there's a big difference between current gen games and say a video game from 1992 or 1995. um there's a video game i played for just a couple minutes last week and i say why i know it's a couple minutes i only noticed they're playing for a while that it actually had a timer in the top left corner and it felt to me like i'd been playing for a long time but i actually saw it was like wow that was only five minutes and i lost interest and went back to my life because i'm not really interested in video games uh i've mentioned um pac-man champion edition that we're sorry championship edition pac-man that is a timer and i believe the maximum length you can play is five minutes so you play that you go oh that was two minutes it's not the same i mean it's it's pac-man it's an incredibly simple game you know um and you know i've criticized numerous other youtube channels for playing games that take up hundreds of hours so whenever that the fact that one thing is better than another or the fact that one thing is worse than another by degrees i don't think that bears on you know the question we're asking here and by the way i mean you could say this about about um addictive drugs too you know okay is heroin better or worse than cocaine or fentanyl there may be significant degrees of difference but i'm against all of them you know what i mean i'm against all these drugs so you know but i i can also admit and we can discuss the extent to which one is is better or worse than another so it doesn't um [Music] it doesn't really touch the primary premise here in any way whatsoever to admit that there are details there are gradients there are these contradictions tcat shouts out duke duke nukem from 1991. so yeah where are you going to where are you going to draw the line you play duke number 191 i think i have a question for you i think um i think virtual fighter one is from before before 1997 but maybe not virtual fighter 3. so you know it's something like that where is the cut off so yeah virtual fighter 2 is 1994. i know maybe i should make it 95 instead of 97. you know uh some something like that okay sir i'm just i'm just catching up with your your other comments guys thanks thanks for any thumbs up again and we'll see if some more people join the conversation melissa may also sign the chairman i'm just reading now but i'll get you you you want to show me now it came up in conversation that our eyes were not evolved some people can say well is this what millions of years of evolution is designed for us reading i agree um no i think that makes it deeper go on i don't think that challenges the premise but it makes it deeper yeah but this issue with uh watching movies or reading where you're consuming something you're at least uh it's not as exhausting i find video games so exhausting now i don't know why you do i don't uh you know were you were you drinking caffeine when you were younger and doing videos yeah when melissa and i have played video games just for a couple minutes here and there we played puyo puyo it's no more than a month ago like just hey look the amount of time we play spent in playing videos per month is very very little despite the fact that i own a ton of hardware we have an amazing collection of video game but we really do um but yeah i noticed that you really quickly get tired uh just it just seemingly exhausted but i guess you were drinking a lot of caffeine uh before so look uh melissa was reminding me of something i said maybe even just earlier today but today or yesterday um and i was pointing this out in terms of the limits of reasoning through things in terms of what's natural and unnatural or how unnatural something is by degrees and you know i just said to melissa our eyes are not evolved to read text on a page which is very true and by the way when i was really pushing my limits in terms of language learning uh working on pali and cambodian and lotion and tai and several other languages simultaneously you know several different systems of writing for pali so i wrote pali using burmese you could really feel it you really feel this is not you know this is not natural the function of your eye is exactly to do things like notice uh fruit on a fruit tree and notice a snake in the grass you'd be amazed at how vivid your perception is when there's a snake moving in the grass toward you you see it it's the most subtle shape by the way the the way this the grass moves the pattern of the grass moving revealing the the shape of the snake you see it that leaps right out at you guys you got millions of years of evolution oh and by the way yeah okay my ability to see how attractive a woman is to see the shape of a woman's body my ex-wife like to joke around with me about that more than than melissa does it's not melissa doesn't about but you know i remember my ex-wife she would always give her she said you can tell you can tell how sexy a woman is even if she's wearing you know dungarees if you're just wearing bib overalls or she's wearing a burlap sack or something you know where the whale the clothes move on the woman i'm not saying a woman wearing a bathing suit like a woman who's like really wearing baggy clothes and you have millions of years of evolution that tells you the shape of that woman's body and how attracted you are to her shirt there's all kinds of really shallow stuff you are evolved to perceive i think you're also very much evolved to make certain kinds of judgments about people um well there's something wrong with this guy you know it's nothing you can tell that he's lying to you but you can tell that he's shaky you can tell there's something wrong certain apprehensions about people and their behavior you know doubtless is also you know these things are natural doesn't mean they're inerrant doesn't mean you won't be wrong nine times out of ten even you know what i mean but this is what you're what you're set up to and yeah reading a book is fundamentally unnatural it is fundamentally something we're not or not um of all to do so no i i really do feel the limits of that critique what are you going to say i mean like anything i just feel that that argument is so limited but i didn't want to bring it up right no okay so look but you guys may not be able to hear melissa i agree that this argument is limited but it still applies to video games like it's still really useful in this con so like to give an example okay so how limited is this concept of nature if someone said to me that they were considering studying politics in university but they decided to instead go into sculpture because they think that's more natural that the study of politics that is completely ridiculous you cannot make this you cannot discern between uh sculpture versus politics through nate now there are a lot of different criteria we can bring in um someone said they were thinking about studying physics you know the science of physics but they decided that was too unnatural so instead they were going to do politics or literature or something this makes no sense this is a nonsensical application but still within those limits it is meaningful it still is important to talk about and uh you know i mean to mention the original context that you and i were were joking about that we were talking about the delusion of jordan peterson um how does jordan peterson convince himself that you were evolved to eat a 100 meat diet so he and his daughter both they claim they eat nothing but meat and salt and so you know you would have to have a tremendous delusion about a revolution that we were evolved to live like a python again just to eat nothing but meat well even then it's cooked meat doesn't make sense because we wouldn't be involved to eat cooked meat in these quantities to have a wonderful time so no nature matters nature is a meaningful criterion within limits and you have to be explicit about what those limits are but that doesn't mean it's it's invalid absolutely now why am i so comfortable saying this it's not because i'm a background in philosophy it's because of my background in politics so polling data polls matter guys there are a lot of questions where polling matters but within limits there are some questions you can never solve through a poll and never solve even through a plebiscite you know but there are some there are some things you can get at through pulling and some things you can't so i think but that doesn't invalidate polling you know what i mean um polling can be tremendously powerful an important tool but you you have to really be aware of the limits of any kind of you know social science tool any kind of measuring tool in this in the social sciences okay um barry scott says hey barry i hope you're still here in the audience barry says maybe you should interview cameron adair from game quitters cameron adair is a complete [ __ ] i've talked to him he is one of the nastiest people i've ever interacted with on the internet i'm not the first person to say that i believe if you put into google right now uh cameron adair thailand dj you are going to find that he has been living as a uh living as a dj in thailand um he is a really uh you misspelled his name and there's an i in there so i think there's a i think there's a different spelling of it um you know that guy is a really nasty piece of work anyway i'm not actually i'm not sure how you've you've misspelled his name or if he deleted all the stuff about us about his djing now the the the message of his foundation about about quitting video games it's so fundamental and it's so necessary that obviously he's getting a lot of positive press a lot of positive response from parents i understand that people are desperate they need someone anyone to help them but uh if there is anyone on the internet i would warn you against it would be cameron adair so too bad and a lot of things are like that on the internet he is a self-appointed expert and he has absolutely none of the uh redeeming qualities that you would need to to play that role i would compare that to by the way people who are former antarctics and they have their own you know if they have their own experience anorexia and they like they overcame anorexia that doesn't mean they can help anyone else that doesn't mean they're the right person to lead a foundation or whatever you know okay so we have uh an intentionally offensive comment for someone who's probably not here anymore people tend to make this going to come and leave so someone called fchtvh says quote such a boomer attack from from a man who grew up with what seems like colorless tvs comma focus on age-related comments okay so fch tbh if i may call you that which country do you think will have an advantage the country that continues to encourage video game addiction and drug addiction or a country that really sincerely tries to stamp those out tries to eliminate let's just say to simplify it tries to eliminate the playing of video games and eliminate the recreational use of mind-altering drugs we don't have to compare china to the united states of america there are a lot of different issues there we could def we could divide japan into two halves north and south we could divide america into two halves east and west say okay half of america are going to put up a border in the middle half of america is going to be pro video game and pro unlimited decriminalized drug use and half america is going to go the other extreme and it's going to really seriously eliminate video games and drug addiction at least to the same extent as communist china maybe even more so where do you think those two societies will be 10 years from now 50 years from now 500 years from now i don't think there's anyone who has any doubt if you divide america into two halves with those two strategies there will be an advantage in every area of society to the half of america that rejects both video game addiction and drug addiction i don't think there even is a counter argument [Music] now again video games and drug addiction they are such extreme examples that this is easy to say right am i comfortable making the same claim about gambling you know i'm really opposed to gambling i am but i think someone could could say or suggest or argue that there's some cultural benefit to gambling gambling is linked to up comedy and dance and music and the celebration enjoyment of life someone could try to make some kind of argument that there were enough kind of incidental benefits to you know las vegas having evan gambling um i am i am morally opposed to you i think if you divided america to two halves one of which has unlimited gambling and one of which has no gambling you'd have to make a similar argument but i'm just saying this issue with video game addiction we're talking about childhood as well as adulthood growing up playing video games for dozens of hours per week for more than 10 hours per week with every day every day school ends rushing home to play video games there's there's no counter argument there at least with drug addiction people start a little bit later in life you know so eliza asks quote i'm curious what is your idea of spending your free time meaningfully i think i've done so many video games i think i've done so many videos talking about that so eliza i have to invoke what i call youtubers privilege here and say i'm sorry i've made so many videos talking about that uh that i'm not gonna i'm not gonna talk about but great question and i'm always happy to talk about that and i've talked about it probably a dozen times from a dozen different angles i also think that my book uh so my book is titled no more manifestos but it's partly a philosophy of how to live a meaningful life and how to be a creative person it's a bit of a philosophy of art too that book will have some some very provocative answers to that question right it's it's much more my videos are relatively friendly to you um it's friendly the right word uh that that book makes some real demands of you where it says look either you're going to live up to this or not kind of thing um so the book is is a little bit more of an abrasive and abrupt and honest way of confronting you with what it means to live a a meaningful life whereas i think most of my videos they relatively gently introduce you to the answer to that question but the implications are not so gentle they're hard to live with all right tcat comments quote the video game industry is a 180 billion dollar industry that averages 10 growth per year with more people having less social connections do you think soft legal bans in the west are even possible well you know the short answer is of course yes i mean you just want a yes or no answer you know of course the answer is yes um [Music] you know the more interesting point is this in a democracy people find it very easy to offer judgments about what would be in everyone's benefit what would be in everyone's best interest and they find it very difficult to make decisions about what would be in their own interests or their employees best interests like the people whose lives they directly affect like when you're an employer employee or you're a husband it's your own family so i'll give you an example let's say you live right now in louisiana and in louisiana in theory nobody is racist but everyone knows there are some schools that have only black people and there are some schools that have only white people there are some schools that have only rich people and some schools that have only poor people now when people make decisions for themselves and for their own family or as an employer for themselves and their employees they make completely selfish and ultimately kind of socially destructive decisions where they just say okay well my children need a good education so i'm going to move to this suburb and pay for them to go to this relatively wealthy school they personally are not going to do anything to help poor black people right but you can have a referendum where you say look guys here's what we really have to do we have to completely abolish the distinction we have right now between private schools and public schools we have to force rich people and poor people black people white people all go to the same school so it's for everyone's benefit and you know we have to really meaningfully integrate the education system you know people will vote for that people like they would never do that personally they would never in an isolated way say okay i'm going to put my child in this school for this altruistic reason of making society a better place and by the way of course to do that it would involve a budget of many many millions of dollars or billions of dollars to actually actually building school facilities and things yeah and and also for the government to actually take away uh the private schools and like take them out of the pub take them out of the private sector into the public sector this requires the the power and coercion of government power um so you know the classic textbook example is minimum wage every employer wants to pay their employees as little as possible and in every sector of the economy parents employ their own children at less than minimum wage so farmers if you have a small farm parents very often have their children working for nothing or if they do pay them they pay them one dollar for something you know now that sounds horrible why don't you pay your kids minimum wage if you ask the parents they'll say why should i have to pay my own kid 15 they won't do it you know um so that sense of self-interest even when it's their own child they're robbing they want their own children to work for free or for next to nothing and they want their own employees to work for free or understanding but if you have a referendum and say for society as a whole isn't it better for everyone that we have a minimum wage whether it's ten dollars an hour or fifteen dollars an hour and that all businesses are force people so that's what you're getting into is um the altruism or you could say we're getting into the phony altruism of coercing others to have virtues that you do not have yourself now melissa was just reading me the statistic i think 83 percent of parents 87 of parents in the united states of america a poll established 87 of parents in the usa oh 86 fact-checking department came through so not too clearly phrased so 86 percent of parents understand america want something to be done to limit the number of hours their kids are playing video games it's a problem right okay so we don't know exactly what the percentage would be for the more specific proposal like this maybe you'll be lower eighty-six percent of parents recognize it's a problem and then we gotta confront them with a solution so you asked the question do you think soft legal bans are possible i think hard legal bans are possible i think you know i think oppression is possible i do and you know again um [Music] people who would not prevent themselves from doing certain drugs or drinking alcohol in certain they're people who will absolutely swear that they personally are fine driving a car when they drink alcohol they personally feel that they're skilled enough and intelligent enough to drive a car after drinking several beers but they don't want other people driving after eating several beers so this is this is one of the most important aspects of of democracy on a large scale oh is today the day that i'm going to ban thaddeus walker from this group thaddeus is one of these anarcho-capital one of these right-wing free marketeers who seems to think that as long as people are paying money for something it can't possibly do any harm to themselves or others or to the future of society as a whole okay so here's another interesting point so someone with the name sorpativ wrote in i hope you're still in the audience and sometimes people comment and then they leave sorptive said quote it's possible to have convivial video games but not when they are designed to capitalize on people's free time they should be designed by people in their free time okay sort of the error you made is in the first few words here you said it's possible legislation is not about what's possible it's about what's actual it's possible to use cocaine at such a low dose that it has no negative consequences for you do you think everyone should have the right to use cocaine that we should legalize cocaine because some people some incredibly small percentage of people will use it in a responsible way we can even calculate what the dose is i knew people who lived in south america and they'd eaten the leaf of the plant directly you do you do you feel the cocaine that way where you chew up uh the leaf of the plant and like you calculate it's you know it's like one tenth of one percent of a line of cocaine is in each leaf or something it's like it's this very tiny amount of the drug that's in each in each leaf so you know it may be on that scale and they saw again obviously i don't i don't really know what this is but they've described to me people have done it the effects of using these incredibly small doses of cocaine it's possible i don't give a [ __ ] about what's possible i'm talking about what's actual because i'm talking about politics we're talking about human nature okay there are all kinds of drugs that could be used responsibly and could even have benefits that outweigh the harms but that's not how people actually do use them so they have to be illegal and we need men with guns to prevent human beings from using them foreign oh okay so a regular commentator here do you want to give me the kiss answers sorry asks answers isn't bad it's not really a question it is an answer rather than a question but regular member of the audience do you want to give the kiss says quote what about a three-hour time limit on chess a three-hour time limit on reading philosophy or a three-hour time limit on watching tv okay let me ask you do you know anyone who dropped out of university because they were addicted to playing chess do you know anyone who ruined their primary school education or their high school education let alone their university education because they were addicted to playing chess now i'm going to go in a limb here i can't say that nobody in the history of the world has gotten addicted to chess that way but i think that the people who have if you actually saw them face to face or an interview with them they would be people with really severe mental abnormalities they'd be people who had some kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder or a learning disability that let them become so consumed with a simple game like chess to that extent you know you know i see what you're getting at here but all legislation is built on animus now every year a very small number of people die because of aspirin you may not know this you can look it up where you live but aspirin overdose does kill people um okay aspirin is a drug that has real benefits that has real medical value um for some trivial illnesses and for some very serious ones you can make an argument that aspirin should be illegal for the same reasons that heroin cocaine and fentanyl should be illegal and it's completely ridiculous it's completely laughable and there would be no sane government ever in the history of the world there'd no no no no democracy and i don't even think any any dictatorship would ever entertain the notion of making aspirin illegal right so you know legislation is based on animus legislation is based on problem solving so is philosophy philosophy is about problem-solving methods so you know i understand what you're doing here i think it's a reasonable challenge to put to me um but you know if you're asking sorry this person else they missed the first i think the first ninety percent of the live streams they joined late um but if you were to ask what is so uniquely awful about drug addiction and video games two two separate categories that we've talked about um we've made comparisons about throughout the video okay well a very very simple criterion to bring to this is that on a mass scale in our society people ruin their education and they ruin their careers both through addiction to drugs and video games not aspirin not chess not reading philosophy okay so again this is so uh ron sims is a long time view of the channel i appreciate your support i have you but ron i got to tell you you're wrong and i got to tell you you're wrong in no uncertain terms here ron writes in and says quote if people want to use drugs they will find a way that's also human nature and no men with guns will stop them period close quote ron you've traveled the world a little bit what's the difference between venice beach and downtown tokyo japan what's the difference between seattle and singapore you're a [ __ ] idiot you're not fifty percent wrong you're a hundred percent wrong you don't know what the [ __ ] you're talking about i used to live on two different sides of the golden triangle okay the golden triangle at that time one of the world's greatest crossroads for opium production heroin production as a global export and also for producing methamphetamine and at that time they were just getting heavily into mdma also known as ecstasy production trafficking export this is one of the great centers of drug production in the world okay and on the chinese side of that border you never saw a single drug addict on the street once not once and it's all being produced right there and there's a by the way who do you think's profiting from it there were armed gangs of rebels and revolutionaries there were revolutionary armies there on the burmese side of the border involved in this and also of course on the burmese side on the lotion side they're corrupt cops and corrupt soldiers there were men with guns on all sides of that equation okay and the chinese government maintained 100 vigilance you never saw a single drug addict you never saw a single drug dealer every single text message between every two phones in that part of china was monitored by the government we talked to one guy who got arrested this way uh i've afraid if he did it by email or by telephone text message or both but a guy who just bought marijuana in china they intercepted his emails and text messages they arrest and put him in jail if anyone mentions anything like a drug deal and you can imagine they have to interpret a lot of slang a lot of indirect things they are picked up and put in jail i saw that happen to uh a bunch of guys who were on the same bus as me once where the the chinese police but they look like the army show up it was the police but they they look like the army is showing up they stop the bus they surround the bus they come in and arrest and rough up the guys and i remember the chinese cop he just you know they don't have the you have the right to remain silent thing the chinese cop took the mobile phone uh from this kid and he stood there and he read out loud the messages on his phone about about drug dealing or drug trafficking they took them and put them in handcuffs and you know um ron you are so wrong you are so wrong like maybe you can't imagine it like you can't imagine the difference between being in a city where it is completely safe for little children to play in the streets in duhong china right in the golden triangle there's illegal guns illegal forestry like illegal timber is huge out there too illegal drug trade one of the world's greatest center and little children are laughing and playing in the streets safe and their parents don't care all right here i am in victoria canada whether in victoria uh vancouver seattle venice beach los angeles you would be ashamed to walk down the street holding your child's hand you would be ashamed and afraid to have a child there you just don't even if the drug addicts don't attack you or something you don't want them to see that you know we've seen people with a needle in their arm it's not a cosmetic difference it's not a trivial difference it's not just a percentage on a chart in terms of the number of people who are ruining their lives okay and yes i have the honesty to tell you that all power to regulate comes out of the barrel of a gun ultimately it comes down to having the will making the resolution to kill people to put people in jail you know sure they can be put on drug rehab programs and all this other stuff too you can give them a velvet manacle you can try to make it as humane as you like it comes from the barrel of a gun it comes from men with guns kicking you on the door and putting people in jail all right now whether you talk about tokyo japan or singapore or taiwan there are some drug addicts there there's more than zero there are a few it is not at the epidemic levels in the united states america and it is hidden and the drugs are really sorry pardon me the drug laws are really seriously enforced and has a huge impact on everyone's lives so let me just ask you where you live you guys are from all over the world we have 40 people in the audience can you read a book in a public park melissa went out to read a book in the park a couple weeks ago and she just described i wasn't with her she went alone at this park and there were a couple of drug addicts who had brought a mattress and put the mattress down on the grass this isn't a small part but it's a big part there are a couple of them over there sitting by the fence passed out we have children playing in the parks here well all around our neighborhood remember there's the park near the church too and like there are parents trying to play with their children while there are people shooting up hard drugs like injecting hard drugs smoking hard drugs overtly in the park and then like sitting there and most of the time they just black out sometimes they die sometimes you have the you know cops come and take away the corpse um sometimes they black out sometimes they're shaking or you know leaned over in this weird way you know and sometimes they have these piles of garbage with them because they go around collecting just odd objects objects no silver like it's not even like it doesn't look like theft to me like but they're like worthless objects that they've gathered from sitting in this pile of garbage that they sit down in because they're higher to their core okay you don't see that in tokyo japan you don't see that in taiwan you don't see that in singapore not even once there's no tolerance for crackheads in those countries in those legal systems in those cultures all right these are decisions that have really serious consequences now if you want to make the point that theoretically someone in singapore someone in taiwan someone in tokyo can buy themselves a can of paint thinner and still huff paint thinner to get high you're god damn right you can get high on paint thinner you can get high on shoe polish okay but like the difference between drug addicts being one tenth of one percent and being like 10 percent of your society is huge and the question of what percentage of your your all of the tax revenue the government has is taken up with social services for for drug addicts this is these are huge huge huge decisions that have huge long-term implications well let's bring it back to the title in the subject of this video though right what percentage of your population is addicted to video games if you take the word addict out of the sentence what percentage of your population is spending what percentage of their time playing video games and then what uh you know what what are the knock-on consequences for society as a whole like you know what happens when it's 50 percent of people spending fifty percent of their time playing video games what happens when it's twenty-five percent of people spending fifty percent of the time playing video games and guys sorry i've made so many videos starting with this but we've all been through it well like i think everyone in this audience has at least had a period of their life of a few months where they were putting like 50 percent of their time into video games you know i mean even if it was just a few months when mario galaxy came out or something right whether it was when you were a child or a teenager you had some period we were caught up in um like maybe a very short term addiction to a video game we were swept up in enthusiasm for uh for video games and it took over your life you know uh great some questions about the books the book is called no more manifestos i feel that i'm now just doing final proofreading i i think i could publish it in one week or two weeks my own situation here has just changed dramatically today in terms of maybe within just a few days um i can i can have that up for sale on uh on amazon but i don't have a deadline um i'm very grateful to my proofreaders including oliver so you guys don't know oliver shields he has he has his own youtube channel that i've shared many times i can give you the link now but you know there's this guy oliver shields uh is his youtube channel it's his full name i think yeah he did proofread it and my girlfriend melissa proofread it but i gotta tell you something i've found errors they didn't find you know um and i did but but at this stage i'm not really doing any kind of substantial substantive changes to it well okay i guess that's not true either i guess the question in my mind is there's one book that i bought repeatedly from amazon and still hasn't arrived i might change a few paragraphs in response to that book and there's one book on the shelf there i guess anyway but i could i could just say no it's enough already and not make any further substantive revisions but yeah i i definitely feel that's within two weeks i could have that book up uh for sale on on amazon how long it takes for amazon to print it and send it to you i don't know but they're they're pretty quick i mean i don't know if it takes them one week after that or something but it might be i bought i've bought books you know printed by amazon that would okay dude you are you are safely off camera okay oh so um we get some interesting comments here from sorptive talking about cleaning up the mess of an opioid epidemic uh this was in the 80s and 90s okay but my question is you made the transition to what you know what is the transition to people talk about now cleaning up um venice beach california because they've they've forbidden uh tents you know but in reality you're taking the drug addicts out of the tents and you know currently they've moved to being instead under um under paracels and they're now in sleeping bags under parasols so you know there's a kind of progress there you got rid of the tents but if you still have the fundamental drug addiction you know that's that's really all there is to it okay guys i'm going to wrap it up here i mean i really want to close the video just by asking again the same question i asked in the in the opening um you know i know this premise nobody has found offensive or nobody has offered a counter argument to which is you know fine um i said that if we're actually going to divide the globe into more than one sphere one one part of which embraces unlimited amounts of playing video games and another part of which is instead trying to limit or discourage video games trying to get people to overcome video game addiction trying to positively motivate them to refuse playing video games entirely and china really seems to be taking the first bold step this way i would be interested in what bhutan has done about this the tiny country of bhutan also has an interesting track record this way and actually really being concerned about video game addiction and how much people were watching television and things like that um they came into the modern technologically sophisticated world relatively late and relatively suddenly but i mean to my knowledge china is really the first country setting a really bold precedent here and it's going to lead to this inevitable question if you have one group of university students they could all be studying english literature they could all be studying medicine they could all be studying physics chemistry and it could all be military men who are studying together to become military engineers or to become snipers or be in the u.s marine corps if you divide that group of students you divide that group of soldiers into two halves and you have one half that's being allowed to engage in unlimited amounts of video game playing and another half that is doing absolutely zero video game playing you know there will only be advantages and no disadvantages for the side that's you know refusing video games if you have half of them using drugs and alcohol in unlimited amounts and half of them who are in a state of enforced absolute sobriety you know they're going to only be advantages for the the sober group of students the sober cohort in your comparative study everyone knows this so when you scale it up and you start talking about societies on the scale of hundreds of millions of people or billions of people we're at a turning point in history where some countries are going to embrace allowing unlimited amounts of drug use unlimited amounts of video game playing unlimited amounts of self-indulgence and some countries are going to start drawing the line the way china has and saying look you know your life means more than this you were born for a purpose better than this you have to start holding yourself to a higher standard of this and we the government are going to hold you to that higher standard whether or not you or your parents volunteer to do so themselves